Female-Male Ratio (FMR)

India is known to be one of the few countries with a female-male ratio (FMR : females per 1000 males; or sex ratio/SR) that has continued to be adverse to women. The disadvantages surrounding Indian women's capacity to survive that leads to this imbalance, are rooted in a complex web of socio-cultural factors . While gender-based  differentials in mortality are seen by some as the main cause behind low FMRs, others have traced the roots of these differentials to an ethos of discrimination against women, which is manifested in their unequal access to life supporting resources such as food, nutrition and health care, specially during childhood . [i] Widespread gender-biased practices thus serve to distort the FMRs among child populations of various ages , finally culminating in the male dominant  FMR of our population .

Table D 6 shows the trends in the general and child sex ratios (CSR : pertaining to the age group 0-6 years) for West Bengal, India and selected states Historically the West Bengal FMR has been  adverse for women to a greater extent as compared to the all-India situation but there has also been a secular rise in the state's FMR so that it is now marginally above the all-India FMR. During 1991-2001 West Bengal recorded the fourth largest  gain in the FMR/SR , rising from 917 to 934 while the all-India  FMR/SR showed a comparatively small gain from 927 to 933. Kerala remains the only state with an SR that is well above 1000. These trends are illustrated in the preceding Chart D I.According to the 1991 census the SR for Scheduled Tribe (ST) population in West Bengal stood at 964 ( as compared to 972 for all-India) and that for Scheduled Caste (SC) population was 931 (vis-à-vis  922 for all-India). District-wise SRs as well as CSRs will be found in Appendix Table AD 1, which provides detailed demographic profiles for each of  the districts of West Bengal.

Child Sex Ratio

Child sex ratios are recognised to be a better indicator of women's position , because it is very unlikely that they would be vitiated by sex-selective migration trends. In a population unaffected by bias against girl children  ( as evident , for example in female infanticide and foeticide) ,  the CSR would favour girls since girls are endowed by nature to be  the stronger sex . This indeed was true of West Bengal till 1971. It is a cause for grave concern that that in West Bengal the SR for children aged up to six years has declined from 1007 in 1971 to 963 in 2001 : " the imbalance that has set in at this early  age group is difficult to be removed and would remain to haunt the population for a long time to come".[i] Ashis Bose would like to coin the acronym BIMARU, "where D stands for daughters and MARU stands for killing " and on the basis of a statistical  cut-off level of 50 points decline in CSR between 1991 and 2001, this marker would apply to Punjab, Haryana , Himachal Pradesh , Madhya Pradesh  and Gujarat. [ii]For West Bengal, however, the fall in the CSR (0-6 years) at minus 4 per cent was relatively negligible, as shown in Table D 6. Analysts have drawn attention to two possible factors behind the falling CSRs : the  SR at birth (SRB : male live births per 1000 female live births)  has become more biased against  females due to the continuing pressure of son preference and secondly, the female age-specific death rates (ASDR) for the age groups 0-4 years and 5-9 years have been found to be higher than the corresponding male rates. In West Bengal, for example, mortality rates for boys and girls in the first group were 18.1 and 18.7 respectively and in the second age group, 1.7 and 2.1 respectively in 1994., pointing to the neglect/deprivation faced by the girl child [iii]; again, the Sample Registration System(SRS) under the Census of India (COI) estimated the  West Bengal and India SRBs at 105.6 and 109.5 respectively in 1991.

Source : K.Srinivasan, "Sex Ratios : What They Hide and What They Reveal", EPW, 17-24 December 1994, Table 1 and Mahendra K.Premi, "The Missing Girl Child", EPW, 26 May 2001, Table 2.